Playing with Perspective in the Garden

We’re lucky enough to have a school garden thanks to support from our school district, our local community, and a non-profit developed by a couple of teachers at my site called Scrumptious Schoolyards. My students had time with the gardening teacher today observing how the garden has changed over the summer…before it is harvested and cleaned up for fall planting. While watching them and listening to their comments and looking at what they noticed, I also had time to snap a few iphone photos.

I’ve been playing around with perspective and point of view, trying a variety of angles–looking up, looking down, getting down low. Here’s one looking up into the “face” of a sunflower.

I purposely got close, wanting to capture the texture of the sunflower’s surface. I love the bright yellow-orange of the petals around the top…and you can see just a hint of the chain link fence around the bottom. This photo is unedited and not cropped…it’s just as I took it.

Another unedited and uncropped photo I took today is this one of squash blossoms. I love the slight shadow on the blossom and the peek at the squash growing in the background.

I also played around a bit with cropping and filters on this photo of the pile of watering cans. Only in a school garden would so many watering cans be sitting together just waiting to be used!

We also have a small corn crop growing tall! With this photo I cropped to focus the photo on the corn and not on the background…and wanted to move the viewer’s eye upward to emphasize the height (while including beautiful blue sky!).

There is so much more that I noticed in the garden today–and saw through my students’ eyes that I wasn’t able to capture in photos. I love their wonder and fascination with bugs and plants. They uncovered caterpillars, carefully held ladybugs (both with and without spots–how I wish I had my macro lens handy!), avoided those big green beetle bugs, and noticed the dragonflies darting overhead. They were astounded by the size of the tomatoes (heirlooms as one student pointed out) and the pumpkins. And they can’t wait to literally dig in and get to the real work on gardening!

What did you see today through someone else’s eyes? How does that change your perspective?